14 Facts About Ossian

Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, originally as Fingal and Temora, and later combined under the title The Poems of Ossian.

Ossian is based on Oisin, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, a legendary bard in Irish mythology.

The main characters are Ossian himself, relating the stories when old and blind, his father Fingal, his dead son Oscar, and Oscar's lover Malvina, who looks after Ossian in his old age.

Hungarian national poet Sandor Petofi wrote a poem entitled Homer and Ossian, comparing the two authors, of which the first verse reads:.

Scottish author Hugh Blair's 1763 A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian upheld the work's authenticity against Johnson's scathing criticism and from 1765 was included in every edition of Ossian to lend the work credibility.

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In Scandinavia and Germany the Celtic nature of the setting was ignored or not understood, and Ossian was regarded as a Nordic or Germanic figure who became a symbol for nationalist aspirations.

Opera Ossian, ou Les bardes by Jean-Francois Le Sueur was a sell-out at the Paris Opera in 1804, and transformed the composer's career.

Macpherson's Ossian made a strong impression on Dugald Buchanan, a Perthshire poet whose celebrated Spiritual Hymns are written in a Scots Gaelic of a high quality that to some extent reflects the Classical Gaelic literary language once common to the bards of both Ireland and Scotland.

Buchanan, taking the poems of Ossian to be authentic, was moved to revalue the genuine traditions and rich cultural heritage of the Gaels.

Subjects from the Ossian poems were popular in the art of northern Europe, but at rather different periods depending on the country; by the time French artists began to depict Ossian, British artists had largely dropped him.

Ossian was especially popular in Danish art, but found in Germany and the rest of Scandinavia.

Many other German works are recorded, some as late as the 1840s; word of the British scepticism over the Ossian poems was slow to penetrate the continent, or considered irrelevant.

Duqueylar, Girodet and Gerard, like Johann Peter Krafft and most of the Barbus, were all pupils of David, and the clearly unclassical subjects of the Ossian poems were useful for emergent French Romantic painting, marking a revolt against David's Neoclassical choice of historical subject-matter.

Ossian made a drawing in 1809, when studying in Rome, and in 1810 or 1811 was commissioned to make two paintings, The Dream of Ossian and a classical scene, to decorate the bedroom Napoleon was to occupy in the Palazzo Quirinale on a visit to Rome.